An evaluation of a professional learning network for computer science teachers

This paper describes and evaluates aspects of a professional development programme for existing CS teachers in secondary schools (PLAN C) which was designed to support teachers at a time of substantial curricular change. The paper’s particular focus is on the formation of a teacher professional development network across several hundred teachers and a wide geographical area. Evidence from a series of observations and teacher surveys over a two-year period is analysed with respect to the project’s programme theory in order to illustrate not only whether it worked as intended, by why. Results indicate that the PLAN C design has been successful in increasing teachers’ professional confidence and appears to have catalysed powerful change in attitudes to learning. Presentation of challenging pedagogical content knowledge and conceptual frameworks, high-quality teacher-led professional dialogue, along with the space for reflection and classroom trials, triggered examination of the teachers’ own current practices

Emergence of computing education as a research discipline

This thesis investigates the changing nature and status of computing education research (CER) over a number of years, specifically addressing the question of whether computing education can legitimately be considered a research discipline. The principal approach to addressing this question is an examination of the published literature in computing education conferences and journals. A classification system was devised for this literature, one goal of the system being to clearly identify some publications as research – once a suitable definition of research was established. When the system is applied to a corpus of publications, it becomes possible to determine the proportion of those publications that are classified as research, and thence to detect trends over time and similarities and differences between publication venues. The classification system has been applied to all of the papers over several years in a number of major computing education conferences and journals. Much of the classification was done by the author alone, and the remainder by a team that he formed in order to assess the inter-rater reliability of the classification system. This classification work led to two subsequent projects, led by Associate Professor Judy Sheard and Professor Lauri Malmi, that devised and applied further classification systems to examine the research approaches and methods used in the work reported in computing education publications. Classification of nearly 2000 publications over ranges of 3-10 years uncovers both strong similarities and distinct differences between publication venues. It also establishes clear evidence of a substantial growth in the proportion of research papers over the years in question. These findings are considered in the light of published perspectives on what constitutes a discipline of research, and lead to a confident assertion that computing education can now rightly be considered a discipline of research

High-school students' mastery of basic flow-control constructs through the lens of reversibility

High-school students specialising in computing fields need to develop the abstraction skills required to understand and create programs. Novices' difficulties at high-school level, ranging from mastery of the "notional machine"to recognition of a program's purpose, have not been investigated as extensively as at tertiary level. This work explores high-school students' code comprehension by asking to reason about reversing conditional and iteration constructs. A sample of 205 K11 - 13 students from different institutions were asked to engage in a set of "reversibility tasklets". For each code fragment, they need to identify if its computation is reversible and either provide the code to reverse or an example of a value that cannot be reversed. For 4 such items, after extracting the recurrent patterns in students' answers, we have carried out an analysis within the framework of the SOLO taxonomy. Overall, 74% of answers correctly identified if the code was reversible but only 42% could provide the full explanation/code. The rate of relational answers varies from 51% down to 21%, the poorest performance arising for a small array-processing loop (and although 65% of the subjects had correctly identified the loop as reversible). The instruction level did not have a strong impact on performance, indicating such tasks are suitable for K11, when the basic flow-control constructs are usually introduced. In particular, the reversibility concept could be a useful pedagogical instrument both to assess and to help develop students' program comprehension

Do differences exist between how Engineering and non-Engineering lecturers perceive the importance of teaching competences?

A survey we conducted a few years ago concluded that higher education teachers should have the following competences: interpersonal, methodological, communicative, planning and management, teamwork and innovation. The authors of this work belong to the Institute in charge of the lecturer-training program at our university, which is basically a technical one. In order to improve our training program, we pose the following research questions: What are the competences that lecturers perceive as less important. Do our university teachers (engineering teachers) have a different perception of the importance of the different lecturer competences compared to that of other teachers? The results we present in this paper come from a survey that was sent to a total of 15,209 teachers belonging to public universities in our community, and we received a total of 2,347 valid answers. As a result of this study, we found which competences are those with a significantly bad rating by lecturers in general, and our lecturers in particular. We analyze what measures should be introduce into our teacher training program.Postprint (author's final draft

Subgoal-Labeled Instructional Material Improves Performance and Transfer in Learning to Develop Mobile Applications

Mental models are mental representations of how an action changes a problem state. Creating a mental model early in the learning process is a strong predictor of success in computer science classes. One major problem in computer science education, however, is that novices have difficulty creating mental models perhaps because of the cognitive overload caused by traditional teaching methods. The present study employed subgoal-labeled instructional materials to promote the creation of mental models when teaching novices to program in Android App Inventor. Utilizing this and other well-established educational tools, such as scaffolding, to reduce cognitive load in computer science education improved the performance of participants on novel tasks when learning to develop mobile applications

NuzzleBug: Debugging Block-Based Programs in Scratch

While professional integrated programming environments support developers with advanced debugging functionality, block-based programming environments for young learners often provide no support for debugging at all, thus inhibiting debugging and preventing debugging education. In this paper we introduce NuzzleBug, an extension of the popular block-based programming environment Scratch that provides the missing debugging support. NuzzleBug allows controlling the executions of Scratch programs with classical debugging functionality such as stepping and breakpoints, and it is an omniscient debugger that also allows reverse stepping. To support learners in deriving hypotheses that guide debugging, NuzzleBug is an interrogative debugger that enables to ask questions about executions and provides answers explaining the behavior in question. In order to evaluate NuzzleBug, we survey the opinions of teachers, and study the effects on learners in terms of debugging effectiveness and efficiency. We find that teachers consider NuzzleBug to be useful, and children can use it to debug faulty programs effectively. However, systematic debugging requires dedicated training, and even when NuzzleBug can provide correct answers learners may require further help to comprehend faults and necessary fixes, thus calling for further research on improving debugging techniques and the information they provide.Comment: To appear at the 2024 IEEE/ACM 46th International Conference on Software Engineering (ICSE '24), April 14--20, 2024, Lisbon, Portuga

Educational Technology and Education Conferences, June to December 2012

The conference list contains events such as "Learning and Teaching","Innovation in e-Learning", "Online Teaching", "Distance Learning Administration", "The World Open Educational Resources Congress", "Mobile Health", and "Realizing Dreams"